[nycbug-talk] IPv6 for ISP Sales People?

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "m" == michael  <lists at genoverly.net> writes:

     m> If you are running important services that require an IP, put
     m> the $20 a month toward renting in a colo.  period.

sounds like an exaggeration, but maybe not, so can you tell us, what
exactly are you renting for $20 and from whom?  a Xen domU or
something?  or is it just a jail?  important production services, huh?

You can get a dedicated box (so it'll run BSD if you want) from
Hetzner for Eur40/mo, but that's not ``<snort> why don't you just pay
it'' cheap any more.  Why shouldn't I get a static IP for free to run
this box from home, if I want to?---paying for numbers is nonsense.

And is double-nonsense in this case, when you're not even paying for
the allocative purpose of convincing you to conserve something scare.
That's already bullshit because the numbers shouldn't be scarce to
start with---we should have v6---and because in environments of huge
economic disparity like 1st vs 3rd world, or home-experimenter
vs. overpeer.com, this is not a parking-meter scenario, and charging
isn't the most effective way to allocate the thing diligently.  But
it's doubly bullshit because dynamic IP people use just as much of the
scarce numbers.  Paying for a static IP, they're paying extra for the
privilege of having the ISP _not_ implement all kinds of complicated
protocols to change around their IP all the time.  I would be happy if
ARIN charged more for global IP's that were allocated dynamically.

Aside from that, if you like to run non-i386 hardware as I do, it can
make sense to host at home.  You can't colocate a 280R for $20, while
operating it at home probably uses ~$20 - $30/mo of power and
summer-aircon.  so it does save money.

but for me, hosting the 280R with the ``important services'' on it is
not an option anyway, because it's mounting iSCSI storage off two
PeeCees for which I would also have to rent space.  but I need those
PeeCee's here at home because my music and NFS server for some
net-booting machines around the house is on them.

If you make a lot of big changes to your OS and want to have a
separate development box and stable box so you can test-and-swap, this
can be cheaper to do at home, too.

If you have physically large but relatively low-traffic servers, like,
oh i don't know, a really big filesystem spread over fourteen disk
drives that is accessed sparsely and slowly by a small number of
patient people, this can be cheaper to do at home, too.  but I'm sure
no home user would EVER be interested in anything remotely like that,
since that has NOTHING to do with what people typically do in their
homes. :) and nothing to do with static IP's, either.  or VPN's, which
also need at least one end to be static to work at all, and need both
ends static to work well.

If you want to run servers, but they aren't ``important'' or
``serious'' or ``production'' (not everything of merit is, thanks very
much), so you run crappy whitebox peecees with goofy heatsinks and
chinese firecracker powersupplies, it's nice to have these at home
near your tools and spare parts.

I currently do run quite a few IP-requiring services at home.  

 http://web.Ivy.NET/~carton/ivy/

I do it because I have six people who all want to run their own
web/mail/jabber/whatever servers with root access on their own
hardware, but they're all so sparsely-used that the lot of them can't
fill a T1.

Three of those boxes are SPARC, but even if they weren't, some of my
friends try to use Xen, but they report back it has weird limits that
you can't have more than four of some networky things, or IPv6 doesn't
work, or it just plain crashes, or you can't find a single version of
it that supports all the guest domU's you want to run.  In fact I
think NetBSD is the only *BSD that supports it, right?  It sounds to
me like it can only work well for a highly homogenous installation
like Hetzner's, not for a bunch of experimenters like us.

And that's just the point---the internet was supposed to facilitate
experimentation.  People who want to do new and interesting things
shouldn't have to bitch and moan, pay a ``pure profit'' creativity
tax, and certainly not plead appologize and make excuses and
justifications for what they want to do on mailing lists just because
the CIO of the bank where they work isn't inclined toward the same
so-called ``solution.''

Also at some times in history, certain kinds of home bandwidth have
actually been cheaper per-gigabyte than data center bandwidth
(probably because they oversell it and expect you not to use it, and
if you do they claim you're using ``excessively'' or ``impacting other
customers in the neighborhood'' and ``5% of our customers are using
90% of the bandwidth, so let's just get rid of that 5% who are
actually asking us to make good on the terms we sold them, and keep
the 95% who pay but don't use.  it's just good business.'' APRU.  and
shut you down, like shared hosting companies do.).

The worst thing about running stuff at home isn't the power or the
aircon.  Adding more breakers isn't too hard, and depending on where
you live adding aircon is possible, too.  The problem is noise.
equipment noise, aircon noise.

and the best thing---the problem I still can't solve otherwise---is
needing to have this multi-terabyte filesystem at home, and mountable,
fast, from other machines at home.  If I can get 100Mbit/s between my
house and the data center, then it's possible to think about moving
everything there, but if the link to my house were so fast, why would
I want to?  I really kind of like having it at home better.  I like to
look at it, but also, having slow, somewhat less reliable access to my
stuff from the Internet, and superfast 100%-reliable access to it over
the LAN from my bedroom, is exactly the direction I want things.

anyway, not everyone's idea of a ``serious service'' is some stupid
vBulletin site running on a vanity domain.  Some people do other
things than that which can't be hammered into some standard cheapo $20
shared hosting / jail package.  Though they may also be very simple
things which others find stupid, it's in the fucking spirit of the
Internet to let me do them, so step off and don't tell me what to buy
or how to buy it kthx!  And certainly don't say that I ought to be
charged a whole bunch extra for something that costs zero to provide
and harms nothing just because it sounds NIH to you.
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